Compromised Data? The social life of data, new tools, audience engagement, and social movements

The second day of the Compromised Data colloquium was fascinating, and I’m looking forward to chasing down further work from many of the presenters.

The opening session started with Lisa Blackman discussing experiments with repurposing commercial software tools to explore contagion in complex environments, drawing on controversies around psychic research of the nineteenth century (including work on automatic writing). I liked the idea of ‘haunted data’: the ways in which research takes on a new life after publication, and may begin to be circulated by non-academic networks in ways that the original researchers never intended.

Ingrid M. Hoofd raised some interesting questions about the ways in which academic institutions, researchers, media, and activists may be becoming implicated in problematic representational regimes in their use of social media. She discussed The Guardian’s Reading the Riots project, which she argued simultaneously made claims to build an empirically-based analysis of the reasons behind the riots while also being based in, and reinforcing, existing stereotypes around class and race.

Yuk Hui‘s work on self-archiving the massive amounts of digital objects which we generated notes the difference between merely storing, and archiving, this material: archiving requires the additional of contextual framing. The theoretical framework of Hui’s work is accompanied by attempts to design self-archiving tools which will allow them to create physical objects through which to share their archives.

Netlytic visualization for the #compdata13 network

The following session explored other attempts to combine analyse with software design. Fenwick McKelvey discussed network diagnostic tools, some of which may be helpful in better understanding NSA surveillance. He also raised questions about the structure of crowdsourced research: often, he notes, researchers set their aims and create the infrastructure for crowd participation, rather than allowing the ‘crowd’ (however that might be defined) to do more in setting research goals and processes.

Robert W. Gehl‘s presentation focused critical reverse engineering approaches, including making suggestions about how these may be applied to the humanities. He argued that critical reverse engineering allows us to understand they ways in which new technologies and systems are not radical breaks with the past, but rather come from a particular history and series of struggles, looking in detail at how this applied to attempts to create an alternative to Twitter, TalkOpen.

Anatoliy Gruzd talked about some of the work currently happening at the Dalhousie University Social Media Lab, including the creation of the Netlytic tool, which may be useful for visualizing networks and is currently being used to explore a number of different online communities and discussions.

In the session on audience engagement, Gavin Adamson looked at some of the ways in which social media is affecting mental health coverage (noting that audiences much prefer to share positive news stories, rather than those framed through the lens of violence/risk); Mariluz Sanchez discussed the use of social media in transmedia storytelling, and Kamilla Pietrzyk gave a thought-provoking presentation on the research she’s beginning on the effects of read receipts on online communication.

Alessandra Renzi and Ganaele Langlois kicked off the final session with a conversation about some of the issues involved in data/activism, exploring the ways in which militant research methods might be combined with critical software studies. They argued that much of the discussion around participatory culture takes celebratory approach to understanding political participation, and that we need to think about the ways in which being ‘active’ differs from resisting existing systems and building alternatives. They also raised many of the questions around the relationship between researchers and activists that Tim and I covered in our talk, including some we hadn’t considered.

David Karpf‘s challenged the idea that online activism, particularly petitions, are spontaneous examples of ‘organising without organisations’. Instead, he argues, a closer look at online petition sites demonstrates that we are seeing organising with different organisations. The organisations involved in MoveOn.org and Change.org both make choices about their platforms which shape the kinds of petitions created (those on MoveOn tend to be more political). MoveOn’s prompts guiding members’ creation of petitions also serve as an educational tool, drawing in part on (Saul Alinsky’s?) ideas about political organising.